Béla Viktor János Bartók (; Hungarian: [ˈbɒrtoːk ˈbeːlɒ]; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Among his notable works are the opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Concerto for Orchestra and six string quartets. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology. Per Anthony Tommasini, Bartók "has empowered generations of subsequent composers to incorporate folk music and classical traditions from whatever culture into their works," and was "a formidable modernist who in the face of Schoenberg’s breathtaking formulations showed another way, forging a language that was an amalgam of tonality, unorthodox scales and atonal wanderings." His work is often described as being a combination of traditional peasants' folk music and avant-garde music.
Childhood and early years (1881–1898)
Bartók was born in the Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary, part of Austria-Hungary (present-day Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) on 25 March 1881. On his father's side, the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating from Borsodszirák, Borsod. His paternal grandmother was a Catholic of Bunjevci origin, but considered herself Hungarian. Bartók's father (1855–1888) was also named Béla. Bartók's mother, Paula (née Voit) (1857–1939), spoke Hungarian fluently. A native of Turócszentmárton (present-day Martin, Slovakia), she had German, Hungarian and Slovak or Polish ancestry.
Béla displayed notable musical talent very early in life. According to his mother, he could distinguish between different dance rhythms that she played on the piano before he learned to speak in complete sentences. By the age of four he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano, and his mother began formally teaching him the next year.
In 1888, when he was seven, his father, the director of an agricultural school, died suddenly. His mother then took Béla and his sister, Erzsébet, to live in Nagyszőlős (present-day Vynohradiv, Ukraine) and then in Pressburg (present-day Bratislava, Slovakia). Béla gave his first public recital aged 11 in Nagyszőlős, to positive critical reception. Among the pieces he played was his own first composition, written two years previously: a short piece called "The Course of the Danube". Shortly thereafter, László Erkel accepted him as a pupil.
Early musical career (1899–1908)
From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano under István Thomán, a former student of Franz Liszt, and composition under János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who made a strong impression on him and became a lifelong friend and colleague. In 1903, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem that honored Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.
The music of Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902 at the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra, strongly influenced his early work. When visiting a holiday resort in the summer of 1904, Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania, sing folk songs to the children in her care. This sparked his lifelong dedication to folk music.
Beginning in 1907, he came under the influence of French composer Claude Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris. Bartók's large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his growing interest in folk music. The first piece to show clear signs of this new interest was the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908), which contains folk-like elements. He began teaching as a piano professor at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, which freed him from touring Europe as a pianist. Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, Gisela Selden-Goth, and Lili Kraus. After Bartók moved to the United States, he taught Jack Beeson and Violet Archer.
In 1908, Bartok and Kodály traveled into the countryside to collect and research old Hungarian folk melodies. Their growing interest in folk music coincided with a contemporary social interest in traditional national culture. Hungarian folk music had previously been categorised as "Gypsy music". The classic example is Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, which he based on popular art songs performed by Romani bands of the time. In contrast, Bartók and Kodály discovered that the old Hungarian folk melodies were based on pentatonic scales similar to those in Asian folk traditions, such as those of Central Asia, Anatolia and Siberia.
Bartók and Kodály set about incorporating elements of such Hungarian peasant music into their compositions. They both frequently quoted folk song melodies verbatim and wrote pieces derived entirely from authentic songs. An example is Bartok's two volumes entitled For Children for solo piano, containing 80 folk tunes to which he wrote accompaniment. Bartók's style in his art music compositions was a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism. His melodic and harmonic sense was influenced by the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and other nations. He was especially fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music. Most of his early compositions offer a blend of nationalist and late Romantic elements.
Middle years and career (1909–1939)
In 1909, at 28, Bartók married Márta Ziegler, aged 16. Their son, Béla Bartók III, was born the next year. After nearly 15 years together, Bartók divorced Márta in June 1923. Two months after his divorce, he married Ditta Pásztory, a piano student, ten days after proposing to her. She was 19, he 42. Their son, Péter, was born in 1924.
Raised as a Catholic, by his early adulthood Bartók had become an atheist. He later became attracted to Unitarianism and converted in 1916. Although Bartók was not conventionally religious, according to his son Béla III, "he was a nature lover: he always mentioned the miraculous order of nature with great reverence". He had a large collection of insects, one of his main interests outside music. Béla III became lay president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church.
In 1911, Bartók wrote his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to Márta. In it, he uses symbolism to show parallels between unconscious motivation and fate. The opera suggests that people cannot control their fates. Bartók entered it for a prize by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they rejected it as unfit for the stage. In 1917 Bartók revised the score for the 1918 première and rewrote the ending. After the 1919 revolution, in which he actively participated, he was pressured by the Horthy regime to remove the name of librettist Béla Balázs from the opera, as Balázs was of Jewish origin, was blacklisted, and had left the country for Vienna. Bluebeard's Castle received only one revival, in 1936, before Bartók emigrated. For the rest of his life, although devoted to Hungary's people and culture, he never felt much loyalty to the government or its official establishments.
After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission competition, Bartók wrote little for two or three years, concentrating on collecting and arranging folk music. He undertook this task with great skill and persistence; the folk music scholar Charles Seeger called him "one of the greatest field collectors of the first half of the 20th century." Bartók found the phonograph an essential tool for collecting folk music for its accuracy, objectivity, and manipulability. He collected first in the Carpathian Basin (then the Kingdom of Hungary), where he notated Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, and Bulgarian folk music. A breakthrough arrived when he collaboratively collected folk music with Zoltán Kodály through the medium of a phonomotor, on which they studied classification possibilities (for individual folk songs) and recorded hundreds of cylinders. He also collected in Moldavia, Wallachia, and (in 1913) Algeria. The outbreak of World War I forced him to stop the expeditions, but he returned to composing with his ballet The Wooden Prince (1914–1916) and the String Quartet No. 2 in (1915–1917), both influenced by Debussy.